Studies
in Antisemitism brings together in one series major worldwide research
on this complex phenomenon from which the student and decision-maker as
well as the general public may learn. The Studies cover antisemitism, ancient
and modern, from a broad range of perspectives: historical, religious,
political, cultural, social, psychological, and economic.

Ronald
Modras

The
Catholic Church and Antisemitism, Poland, 1933-1939

Published for the Vidal Sassoon
International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem byharwood academic publishers: Australia!Austria!Belgium!China!France!Germany!India|Japan!Luxembourg!Malaysia!Netherlands!Russia!Singapore|Switzerland!Thailand!United Kingdom!United States

1.
Jewish origins and autonomy 22.
Opposition: the church and the guilds 63.
A haven for dissent 84.
1648: the Ukrainian uprising and Polish decline 115.
Finis Poloniae? 15

Interwar
Poland: A Context for Conflict 18

1.
The partitions and the church 182.
Acculturation and antisemitism 213.
Endecja 224.
1918: Frontier wars and Polish pogroms 245.
A multi-national state 266.
Sanacja 297.
World depression 318.
Antisemitism under the Colonels 33

More Catholics and more Jews lived
side by side for more years in Poland than anywhere else in their histories.
Before the frontiers of the First Polish Republic began to recede in 1772,
an estimated four-fifths of the world's Jews lived within them. This was
hardly surprising, since Jews had earlier been expelled from England (1290),
France (1394), Spain (1492), Portugal (1497), and Hungary (1526). Blamed
for epidemics like the Black Death (1347+1351),
regularly harassed and persecuted in Germany and Bohemia, Jews came to
Poland as a place of refuge. The climates of Western European might have
been milder and the economies more diversified, but, in the opinion of
Rabbi Moses Isserles in seventeenth century Kraków,
it was“preferable to live
on dry bread and in peace in Poland.”

One of the most influential sages
in all of Jewish history, Isserles interpreted the Hebrew word for Poland,
Polin, to mean “here” (poh) there is “rest” (lin).
Poland in the late middle ages had become what first Babylonia and then
Spain had been earlier, the spiritual center of world Jewry and principal
wellspring of its learning. Needless to say, the idea of a haven and spiritual
center for Jews was hardly congruous with what would be a dominant Roman
Catholic perspective on Poland, namely a bulwark of Western Christianity
vis-à-vis Muslim infidels,
Eastern Orthodox schismatics, and in this century Soviet atheists.

I have written this book to fill
a gap and draw attention to the activity of the Catholic church at a critically
sensitive time and place. The topic is controversial. Selective traditions
of writing the history of Polish-Jewish relations have developed over the
last several decades. Some Polish historians have tended to focus on the
centuries when Poland was a haven for Jews. Jewish historians generally
give much more attention to the twentieth century, when Nazi Germany transformed
Poland into what is now for many Jews simply a cemetery. Of course, Poland
is much more than that, especially now after the collapse of the communist
empire which it helped to engineer. But even for those for whom the events
of 1933 to 1945 are a source of profound personal loss, for Jews and Christians
both, cemeteries are places that command respectful attention.

No nation suffered more under German
occupation than Poland did. Three million Polish Jews and three million
ethnic Poles died under the Nazi terror. Although World War II was fought
conventionally on the western front, it was anything but conventional in
Poland. Under ordinary rules of warfare, the killing of non-combatants
ends with surrender. In Poland the killing of unarmed civilians increased
with pacification. Poland was filled, in Richard L. Rubenstein's apt and
insightful phrase, with “surplus populations.”

In the Nazi hierarchy of races,
the Poles, like all Slavic peoples, were classified as Untermenschen
(sub-humans), fit only to be slaves (Slaven = Sklaven) for
the Herrenvolk. Obviously the Reich did not need more than twenty
million slaves to work its factories, mines, and quarries. The surplus
Polish population was marked for programmatic reduction by way of overwork,
starvation, and, beginning with potential leaders of a resistance, more
systematic measures. Poland's more than three million Jews, the largest
Jewish community in Europe, were even less than sub-human according to
the Nazi taxonomy. Designated as inhuman, disease-ridden vermin, they were
not only “not worthy of life” but a mortal danger to the rest of Europe,
fit only for extermination.

Auschwitz was the ultimate outcome
not only of engineering and modern bureaucratic routine, but of a racist
ideology that saw state-sponsored genocide as an Endlösung
or “Final Solution.” The phrase is often used today without advertence
to the fact that solutions are answers to problems or questions. Before
there was a “Final Solution,” there was,not
only for Nazis but for Christians throughout Europe, especially for conservative
Catholics, and even for Jews who succumbed to the prevailing ideology,a
“Jewish question.”

This book is largely an exercise
in retrieval. It seeks to recover an era made distant not only by the passage
of over fifty years but by the horrific events of World War II, the Holocaust,
and the Cold War. Substantial historical research and reflection has been
brought to bear on the Shoah, the destruction of Europe's six million
Jews. Less attention has been given to the years immediately prior to it.
This book attempts to recall that period in European, specifically Polish
history, when Jews constituted a “question.” It also reappraises and rejects
the commonplace assumption that the church's traditional “teaching of contempt”
(Jules Isaac's term) was of peculiar significance for the Polish church.
There was more to the “Jewish question”for traditionalist Catholics than
seeing Jews as rejected by God for their supposedly singular responsibility
for the death of Jesus.

In interwar Poland as elsewhere
in Catholic Europe, the “Jewish question” was seen as largely originating
in 1717. Catholic theologians found it striking that Providence seemed
to unleash Satan at two-hundred year intervals: first 1517, then 1717,
and most recently 1917. Readers with a sense of history will recognize
1517 as the onset of the Protestant Reformation, and 1917 as the year of
the Bolshevik revolution. But 1717? Most reflection on the 1930s and the
“Jewish question” ignores or gives short shrift to the founding of the
Grand Lodge in London and the organization of modern Freemasonry in 1717.

The notion of a sinister alliance
between Freemasons and Jews to subvert traditional European society originated
in Germany but first flourished in France, where it played a conspicuous
role in the turn-of-the-century Dreyfus Affair. “Juden und Freimauer”
was a battle-cry for the German right wing, as it was for Hitler in his
rise to power. Although a staple of the antisemitic arsenal of the 1930s
and closely connected with the notorious Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, the idea of a Masonic-Jewish alliance has been largely forgotten
today, neglected even by writers on Christian-Jewish relations and the
Holocaust.

The enormously important book by
Jacob Katz, Jews and Freemasons (1970), has not had the impact on
scholarship that, in my opinion, it deserves. Hans Küng, in his imposing
and virtually encyclopedic work on Judaism and Jewish-Christian relations,
Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1992), appears unaware
of Katz's work on the significant role played by the mythic alliance. Even
in its revised, updated edition, Edward Flannery's excellent history of
Christian antisemitism, The Anguish of the Jews (1985), gives the
alliance only brief notice. No author, to my knowledge, has expounded with
any detail the connection of the supposed alliance with the Catholic church's
century-long struggle against political liberalism. And yet this, my research
reveals, was not only present but central to the efforts of the Polish
hierarchy and clergy to create or preserve what they conceived of as a
“Catholic Poland.” Far from singular, their efforts, the literature also
indicates, were merely one component in the broader Catholic polemic that
saw Jews as agents of liberalism, associated with Masons to disestablish
the church.

This is not a book about Poland.
I am not a student of Polish history. My training has been that of a theologian,
and, as an American Roman Catholic, I have spent much of my professional
life studying and reflecting on the history and theology of the Roman Catholic
church. Three of my grandparents came from Poland, however, and I have
expended considerable time and effort toward understanding the historical
stance of my church toward Jews. This is a book about one aspect of the
Catholic church,in the 1930s, when
Jews throughout Europe constituted a “question”; in Poland, where no other
institution could claim an even comparable moral authority in forming popular
attitudes and opinions.

I have limited my research almost
exclusively to published works and to the years circumscribed by the Nazi
rise to power and the German invasion Poland. I have concentrated on Polish
Catholic periodical literature to create a window on the public Catholic
consciousness of that most Catholic nation. My research is based on some
two-thousand pages of material, photocopied from virtually every important
periodical published during those years under Catholic auspices. They were
gleaned from thousands of pages more, perused for any significant reference
to Jews, Judaism, or antisemitism. No one, of course, read all those periodicals.
(In some instances I found myself opening journals previously uncut.) And
it is methodologically impossible to determine the precise influence they
had on their readers, let alone the broader Polish Catholic consciousness.
But taken collectively they tell us not only what individual Catholic writers
thought about Jews but what their readers, especially priests, were wont
to think. They are indicative of the clerical mind-set at the time. How
much influence the church's pulpit exerted on Catholics at the time is
even more indeterminate, but it was hardly negligible.

In the analysis and presentation
of my research, I allow my sources to speak for themselves, saving any
extended moral assessment until the end. I have found it necessary, however,
to place it in an historical context. No church in the Roman Catholic communion
is an island. The church in Poland was the recipient of a tradition and
part of a network, very much in union with the Holy See. I will also leave
to the end any judgment whether or not it was out of step with the other
Catholic churches of Europe when it came to antisemitism and the “Jewish
question.”

I came to this study inspired by
the dedicated example of Dr. Joseph Lichten of the Anti-Defamation League
of B'nai B'rith, a professional in Catholic-Jewish relations, a pioneer
in Polish-Jewish relations. I came to it too after many years on the Advisory
Committee to the U.S. National Council of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat
for Catholic-Jewish Relations. It was, however, my participation in the
Polish-American Jewish-American Council that most convinced me of the need
for such a work. When I first approached the Jewish Community Council of
Detroit to enter into dialogue with Polish-American representatives, I
never imagined that the American Jewish Committee and Polish American Congress
would raise that local interchange to the level of a national coalition.
I am obliged to those who made it possible: Harold Gales, George Szabad,
Leonard Chrobot, and David Roth.

More immediately my research was
made possible by an initial grant from the Vidal Sassoon International
Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) of the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, and a sabbatical granted by Saint Louis University, both of
which allowed me to travel to libraries in Poland and Rome. Subsequent
grants for research travel came from the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the American Philosophical Association, and the Mellon Faculty Development
Fund of Saint Louis University. A fellowship awarded by the Annenberg Research
Institute (Philadelphia) allowed me to begin the analysis of my research,
freed from my university teaching responsibilities.

I wish to acknowledge the helpful
courtesy of the staffs of at the following institutions: in Rome the Polish
Institute, the Polish College, and the Pontifical Center for Ecclesiastical
Research; the Secret Vatican Archives; in Kraków
the Jagiellonian University and the Jesuit College; the University of Warsaw;
Yad Vashem in Jerusalem; Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.;
Saint Hyacinth Seminary-College (Granby, MA), home of the Maximilian Kolbe
Archives; the Library of Congress; the New York City Library; the YIVO
Institute (New York); and the library of Saint Louis University.

I wish to thank those colleagues
and friends who read parts of this manuscript and offered their helpful
and constructive criticism: Rabbi David Berger (Brooklyn); Dr. John Klier
(London); Dr. Anthony Kosnik (Detroit); Dr. Francis Nichols (St. Louis);
Dr. Harry Offenbach (St. Louis); Dr. Kenneth Parker (St. Louis); Dr. Neal
Pease (Milwaukee); Dr. Jose M. Sanchez (St. Louis); Mr. and Mrs. George
and Shirley Szabad (Haverford), and Rabbi Sherwin Wine (Detroit). They
are, of course, not responsible for its shortcomings. I am indebted to
Mrs. Janice Harbaugh for her invaluable expertise and technical assistance
in bringing this manuscript to completion, and to Ms. Alifa Saadya of the
Vidal Sasson International Center for the Study of Antisemitism of the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem for her skill and solicitude in editing
it. Singular thanks go to my wife, Mary Elizabeth Hogan, for sitting with
me in under-heated libraries and lending this enterprise her long-suffering
support.